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Tallying Stimulus Jobs Is Not Easy in New York

Hardly a day has passed in the six months since President Obama signed the $787 billion stimulus package without an elected official announcing how a chunk of the $5 billion or so that is coming to New York City will be spent.

The money has been designated for a wide variety of uses, including road and bridge repairs ($215 million), summer jobs for teenagers and young adults ($18.5 million), public-housing improvements ($374.2 million), food stamps ($841 million) and Medicaid ($1.59 billion).

But counting the money coming in is a much simpler task than trying to measure just how many jobs the stimulus money will create. Based on the $3.25 billion already allocated, the city estimates that 30,776 jobs will be created by early 2011.

The amount that has actually been spent and the jobs that have already been created are a fraction of those figures, officials say, though no precise numbers are available. The projections of how many jobs the stimulus program will create or save in the city have brought accusations from the city’s comptroller, William C. Thompson, that the mayor’s office has resorted to “puffery.”

In one example, the city government’s online tracker of stimulus funds attributes nearly 5,000 jobs to a scheduled replacement of ramps that lead to the main ferry terminal on Staten Island. That project is budgeted at $175 million.

“As you are aware, the effort to measure the impact of federal stimulus dollars on local labor markets is, at this point, extremely speculative,” said Mr. Thompson, the likely challenger to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg in the November election, said in a letter to the mayor. The comptroller said the mayor had more than doubled the job-generating effect of the money.

Even one of the ferry terminal project’s biggest champions was unsure how the jobs estimate was calculated. Representative Michael E. McMahon, a Democrat from Staten Island, said the company hired to rebuild the ramps to the terminal would employ 100 to 200 people at the site once the work got going in the fall.

The construction company, Conti Group, has leased offices near the terminal as a base of operations. Once Conti has workers on the site, tearing down the 60-year-old ramps and replacing their steel bases, the ripple effect will take hold, Mr. McMahon said. Those workers will spend their pay on lunches from nearby delis, and their employer surely will buy supplies from local merchants, purchases that could spur additional hiring in the neighborhood.

Add it all up, he said, and “you get into the hundreds” of jobs. But, he added, “I don’t see how you get thousands.”

Still, Mr. McMahon did not want to foreclose the possibility of such a boon from a single repair project. “If you find out it’s thousands, would you let me know?” he said.

City officials said they have used established federal formulas for estimating jobs for each project that is receiving stimulus money. On the ferry terminal project, they cited a United States Department of Transportation standard of about 28 jobs created, both directly and indirectly, for every $1 million spent. The comptroller countered that the more conservative ratio of 11 jobs per $1 million recommended by the president’s Council of Economic Advisers would have been more realistic.

“There’s no incentive for us to inflate the numbers,” said Jeffrey A. Kay, director of the mayor’s office of operations.

Mr. Kay said he had no good answer yet for exactly how many jobs in the city would be created. But he said the city was obligated to report an actual count of people employed in those projects by Oct. 10.

Claims about the job-creating powers of the stimulus act have stirred controversy across the country. As the national unemployment rate climbed past 9 percent, Republican leaders and conservative critics have repeatedly questioned the Obama administration’s projection that 3.5 million jobs would be created or saved by early 2011.

About one of every 16 of those jobs — a total of 215,000 — was supposed to be in New York State. But that estimate came from the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, not from state officials.

Gov. David A. Paterson had been making forecasts about job creation with each announcement about the allocation of additional stimulus funds. In July, for example, he said that $33.1 million to be spent fixing highways and bridges in the city would create 794 jobs.

Since then, the governor’s office has stopped volunteering such estimates, acknowledging the lack of precision they entail, said David Neustadt, a spokesman for the governor.

Infrastructure projects have received much of the attention in the debate over the stimulus because they are so tangible. But in New York City, some of the biggest targets of the federal funding have been benefits programs like Medicaid and food stamps.

The city’s nearly $1.6 billion in Medicaid relief will simply reduce the city’s share of its Medicaid burden, Mr. Kay said. But the $841 million for food stamps went directly to the program’s recipients, who received a 13.6 percent increase in benefits in April.

Over the next two years, the city expects to spend about $1.9 billion of the stimulus on schools. Without it, city officials have said, the Department of Education would have had to lay off thousands of teachers.

So far, Mr. Kay said, city officials have concentrated on spending money that could or had to be spent quickly. Much of the infrastructure money came with a use-it-or-lose-it ultimatum from the federal government. So city officials swapped some of it into projects, like the ferry terminal ramps, that had already been budgeted.

“What the city has done well is, we’re supposed to have shovel-ready jobs. We have them,” Mr. Bloomberg said in a radio interview this month. “We’re doing a whole bunch of things that we had ready to go, been approved, been through all of the democratic processes, done environmental reviews and all of that stuff, and everything is there and is going ahead now.”

Public housing projects will receive new roofs, brickwork and elevators, as well as 56,000 new refrigerators and 22,000 stoves that are more energy-efficient.

Nearly $36 million will enable the Police Department to hire 125 new transit officers, which will allow more experienced officers to be utilized in anti-terrorism teams; an additional $3.5 million will help pay for community courts in Midtown and Red Hook, Brooklyn.

An anti-graffiti measure in parks and playgrounds will get $300,000; a further $1 million or so will help employ people to perform maintenance and repairs in neighborhoods with high rates of foreclosure and abandonment.

Still, analysts said it was too soon to tell how New York compared with other cities in using the stimulus money to spur a turnaround of its economy.

“A very small percentage of stimulus dollars have actually been spent” across the country, said Eric Gillespie, chief information officer of Onvia, a Seattle company that has created an online database of stimulus-funded contracts. Only minor progress has been made “in terms of dollars landing in the hands of people who are going to spend it and create the mythical new jobs,” he said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on page A24 of the New York edition with the headline: Counting Up Stimulus Jobs Is Not Easy In New York. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe